C: The Preprocessor

Sometimes you just have to step that extra mile and do something completely dodgy.

The termios way for setting baudrates uses macros to represent the bitrate.  When you’re accepting a baudrate from the user, what’s the most sensible way to do it in C?

1. Get the macro value directly from the user.
2. Get the baudrate as a string, and then string compare to determine which baudrate you want, and set the flags appropriately.
3. Get the baudrate as an integer, and then integer compare to determine which baudrate you want, and set the flags appropriately.

People answering 1 or 2 can hand in their C licenses.

So you’re doing integer comparisons, right?  Hey, we can use a switch/case statement for that, right?

So shortly we get:

switch (baudrate) {
case 50:
    baudflag = B50;
    break;
case 75:
    baudflag = B75;
    break;

… etc …

Surely there must be a better way?

Thanks to the C preprocessor, we have a slightly better option…

#define SPEEDMAP(x) case x: baudflag = B ## x; break;
switch (baudrate) {
SPEEDMAP(50);
SPEEDMAP(75);
SPEEDMAP(110);

…etc…

I wouldn’t get too carried away with solving stuff this way though…